Another Course Correction for City Policing

In recent years, pressured by the courts, the federal government and the public, New York City has taken several important steps to make its policing policies fairer, more rational and, ultimately, more effective. It has greatly scaled back its practice of stopping and frisking people in high-crime neighborhoods. It has reduced the number of people prosecuted on minor marijuana charges. The Manhattan and Brooklyn district attorney’s offices announced they would no longer prosecute most people arrested on fare-beating charges.

On Wednesday came another major step in the evolving effort to move the city’s police practices from an abusive past into a more enlightened future: The district attorneys from Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan and Queens moved to dismiss 644,000 outstanding arrest warrants stemming from minor offenses at least 10 years old, more than a third of the city’s 1.6 million outstanding summons warrants.

This backlog stems from the now-discredited belief that petty offenses, like riding a bike on the sidewalk or drinking in public, could lead to more serious crimes. The result was the blanketing of minority neighborhoods with criminal summonses that forced hundreds of thousands of people to live with a constant threat of jail time for minor infractions. The city recently cut the number of summonses issued and encouraged officers to shift many common petty offenses into civil court, where people can avoid criminal records and can sometimes make amends through community service. The district attorneys’ actions continue this process, although with many warrants still pending, many of them clearly unjust, more needs to be done.

In 2009, at the height of zero-tolerance policing, the city handed out more than 500,000 summonses, compared with about 268,000 last year. Few summonses result in a guilty finding. But people who forget court dates for offenses like littering are subject to arrest warrants that can land them in jail — sometimes for days — the next time they encounter a police officer in, say, a routine traffic stop. Warrants can also make it difficult to find jobs or get apartments. Immigrants can be denied citizenship applications or be deported.

The de Blasio administration has rolled out a revised summons form that will make it easier for people to know when they should be in court. The city is also testing a system to send reminders by text. Defense lawyers argue that the system still criminalizes far too many low-level offenses.

The decisions to dismiss the 644,000 summonses for minor offenses were based on the argument that people who have stayed out of trouble for a decade deserve to have such warrants erased. But injustices, of course, did not end 10 years ago; summonses continued to be handed out in large numbers between 2008 and 2013, many unfairly. That was underscored in a settlement this year, when the city agreed to pay up to $75 million to settle a class-action suit charging that the police disproportionately singled out minority citizens while issuing hundreds of thousands of summonses without legitimate cause.

This week’s mass expungement represents an indictment of the summons system itself — and a recognition that far too many people were brought into contact with the justice system for petty offenses that in no way jeopardized public safety. Given that understanding, the district attorneys need to take another swing at this problem, to expunge the records of others who may have been unjustifiably caught in the zero-tolerance dragnet.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: A Course Correction for City Policing. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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